Description
Book SynopsisIn eighteenth-century China, a remarkable intellectual transformation took place, centered on the ascendance of philology. In
China’s Philological Turn, Ori Sela foregrounds the polymath Qian Daxin to reconstruct the history of eighteenth-century Chinese learning and its long-lasting consequences.
Trade ReviewOri Sela clearly and persuasively argues for the importance of the philological turn in the late eighteenth century, explaining fully the larger moral and intellectual justification for the turn and its significance for the whole course of Chinese intellectual history. This book also treats an extremely important figure in the history of Chinese scholarship, Qian Daxin. Sela makes clear both the remarkable range and depth of Qian’s philological scholarship and the crucial moral and ethical importance that Qian saw in what has often been dismissed as dry pedantry. -- Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University
In
China’s Philological Turn, Sela explicates the superlative classical scholarship championed by the literatus Qian Daxin (1728–1804). Among the leading classicists in Qing China, Qian and his students and colleagues were forgotten after the Opium War. Overlapping the prisms of society, ideas, and science, Sela reexamines China’s eighteenth-century philological revolution and convincingly shows that modern historians have generally overlooked the ‘philological turn’ from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. -- Benjamin A. Elman, Princeton University
In this rich and lucidly argued account of the mid-Qing revolution in Chinese intellectual thought and identity, presented on its own terms and within the contexts of social history and the history of science, Ori Sela definitively lays to rest outdated understandings of China's relation to the modern world. It is a timely reminder of the contemporary resonance of historical understanding. -- Joanna Waley-Cohen, Julius Silver Professor of History, New York University and Provost, NYU Shanghai
A well-researched work and offers a new standard for the comprehensive study of high-Qing polymaths. For years
to come, it will be an important reference for conceiving the relationship between Han learning and Song learning, philology and science, social network and scholarly pathway. * East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine *
Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Way and Its Crossroads
Part I. The Way of Man: Scholarly Networks and the Social History of Scholarship 1. Learning to Be a Scholar
2. Official Scholars and the Growing Philologists’ Networks
3. Private Scholars, Private Academies, and the Community of Knowledge
Part II. The Way of Antiquity: Searching for the True Way in the Past4. The Way of Ancient Learning: Philology, Antiquity, and
Ru Identity
5. Philology and the Message of the Sages: The
Classics and the
Four Books6. Historical Philology: Navigating the Sources
Part III. The Way of Heaven and Earth: The Mandate of Scholarship and the Search for Order 7. Astronomy, Mathematics, and Calendar: Historical Perspective
8. Ancient Learning Encounters Western Learning: Scientific Knowledge and Its Cultural Baggage
9. Fate, Ritual, and Ordering All Under Heaven
Conclusion: The Consequences of the Eighteenth-Century Intellectual Turns
Appendix A: Selections from Qian Daxin’s 1754 Palace Examination Answer
Appendix B: Major
Shuowen and
Erya Studies of the Qian-Jia Period (and Related Works)
Appendix C: Qian Daxin’s Letter to Dai Zhen
Appendix D: Questions and Answers About Astronomy
Appendix E: Essay on the Value of
Pi Π
Appendix F: Qian Daxin’s Writings on Mathematics, Astronomy, and Divination
Appendix G: On Saṃsāra
Appendix H: Sources for the Works of Qian Daxin
Note on Abbreviations and Citations
Notes
Selected Bibliography of Chinese and Japanese Titles
Index
